Ideas about language in Shakespeare 2: words

Chapter three
 There is one major problem with Shakespeare’s
comedies: they are not funny.

Instead, they are studded with scenes where two or

more characters, one of them a supposedly ‘witty’ (остроумный)
clown, swap impenetrable (непонятные) references and obvious
puns (игра слов).
 Сюжет
«Комедия ошибок» The Comedy of Errors

Главные герои — две пары близнецов: Антифолус из Сиракуз и Антифолус из Эфеса, а

также их слуги — два Дромио. Оба Антифолуса и Дромио являются очень похожими друг на
друга, что приводит к многочисленным комическим путаницам и недоразумениям. Герои
часто ошибаются в идентификации друг друга, что создает забавные ситуации и приводит к
юмористическим диалогам.События комедии ошибок быстро развиваются и
сопровождаются рядом запутанных ситуаций. Антифолус из Сиракуз приезжает в Эфес и
сталкивается с подозрением, насилием и путаницей, вызванными его двойником. Герои
неоднократно перепутываются себя с другими и испытывают странные обстоятельства,
такие как получение денег за обед и заботу о незнакомой женщине, которую они принимают
за свою жену.В итоге все недоразумения разрешаются, и близнецы находят друг друга,
примиряются и отправляются в дальнее путешествие. Комедия ошибок наполнена
энергией, веселыми сценами и каламбуром, что делает ее одной из самых популярных
комедий Шекспира.
Antipholus is Dromio’s master. We have just seen him beat his servant for what he thinks
is insubordination but is really the result of confusion attendant on the presence of twins
identical to Antipholus and Dromio in the city.

angry
dare first declaring his intention to perform, and inviting Antipholus to allow the performance

asks for a demonstration Dromio begins by shifting between senses of

‘time’. Antipholus begins with ‘time’ in the sense
of ‘appropriate time’: ‘learn to jest in good time;
there’s a time for all things’ (though ‘good time’
might also be taken to mean ‘quickly’ – ‘learn to
jest appropriately as soon as you can’).

Dromio shifts from ‘appropriate time’ to ‘enough

time’: there may be an appropriate time for all things,
but there is not enough time for someone who goes
bald to get his hair back.
 Such exchanges are common in Shakespeare, and throughout early modern
drama – so we must assume that they were perceived as funny, or witty,
then. Hostile (unfriendly) responses to this kind of writing can, however, be
traced from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. In 1765, Dr Johnson
memorably set out his irritation in the ‘Preface’ to his edition of Shakespeare:

A quibble (pun), a small and often irrelevant argument or point, is like

a distracting and misleading phenomenon to Shakespeare. He tends
to follow it without considering the consequences, and it can lead
him astray and cause problems. Despite being insignificant, a
quibble has a powerful influence on his mind, and he finds delight in
it even if it means sacrificing reason, propriety, and truth.

Molly Mahood claims that Johnson’s objections to puns (or quibbles, to use his term) are due
to ‘a linguistic revolution’ which separates ‘his verbal habits from Shakespeare’s’.
Molly Mahood was an early champion of ‘wordplay’ as ‘a game the
Elizabethans played seriously’; Pat Parker has argued, across a series
of articles and books, that wordplay deserves more than a groan and
invented stage business; Russ McDonald has suggested that we give
notice to the notion of the ‘serious pun’.8 This counter-tradition is
rooted in the historicized, rhetorical approach to Shakespeare’s
language exemplified by the work of Miriam Joseph, which is not
made uneasy by the artificial nature of puns, and which does not
necessarily view the connections made in wordplay as arbitrary.9
Following this tradition, I want to suggest that if we take a
properly historicized view of wordplay, we will find that when it
comes to ‘unfunny’ puns, in performance and reading, the fault
lies not in Shakespeare, but in ourselves.
 An attempt to historicize our understanding of wordplay
might well begin with a consideration of the word ‘pun’ itself.
Look up the word ‘pun’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, and
you will be told that the word appears first with its cognate verb
soon after 1660.In other words, there are no puns in
Shakespeare in the strict historical sense that the word seems
not to have been available to him: it appears in print around the
middle of the seventeenth century, after his death. This of
course does not mean that the thing cannot be found in
Shakespeare, or that his culture did not have other terms for
the thing, but it should at least give us pause when we try to
think about how the Renaissance might have approached
‘puns’.
W

A word which was, just, available to Shakespeare, and which

O
significantly co-occurs with ‘pun’ frequently in its earliest OED
citations is ‘quibble’, the word Dr Johnson uses.
Shakespeare does not use the term ‘pun’ as it was not available to him. ‘Quibble’ was used
during his lifetime, but only really became established, like ‘pun’, towards the end of the seven
tenth century. The term seems to have its origin in highly Latinate, legal English – if not in fact in
Latin itself. ‘Quirk’, ‘quib’ and ‘quip’ were all available to him and he sometimes used them, but
in certain contexts, words may have meanings different from our common understanding of a
"pun." Instead, they might be associated with legalistic arguments or competitive exchanges of
cleverness. The definitions in these contexts don't involve combining multiple meanings or the
clever merging of two different words, as we typically think of puns today. Essentially, the use of
the term in these situations is different from our modern understanding of wordplay.
 What about rhetorical terms? If there isn’t a readily available
native equivalent to our term ‘pun’ in Shakespeare’s day, then
perhaps it’s because there was a readily available rhetorical category
which already did the job? There are several good accounts of Renaissance
rhetorical terms for wordplay but, perhaps surprisingly, there is no clear term
for what we would call a pun.

Miriam Joseph uses four rhetorical terms to cover the notion of

‘pun’

• Antana clasis
• Syllepsis
• Paronomasia
• Asteismus
 “Antanaclasis” she defines as ‘a figure which in repeating a word
shifts from one of its meanings to another’, giving (amongst others) the following
examples:

To steal:
1) move away unnoticed.
2) take without permission

represent instances of the ‘same’ word, perhaps with a

metaphorical extension involved.

Pole:
1) either of the regions contiguous to the extremities of the earth's rotational axis.
2) Stake (столб)

Although ‘pole’ and ‘pole’ are homophones, the OED gives them separate entries, and different etymologies (from Latin ‘polus’ and
‘palus’ respectively), though OED spelling forms suggest that they have always been homophonous in English – so for most
English speakers they have always been indistinguishable in use. It is arguable that it is only with standardization and the fixing of
spelling and defi ni tions by dictionaries that these become two ‘different’ words in English.
Syllepsis is also defined as a figure involving one word with more than one meaning,
though it is distinguished from antanaclasis by the fact that in syllepsis, the word appears
only once, with both meanings brought simultaneously into play: ‘hang no more about
me, I am no gibbet for you’ (MW 2.2.16 –17).

Hang Gibbet
1. To fasten from above 1. A device used for hanging a
with no support from person until dead; a gallows.
below; suspend. 2. To expose to public ridicule
2. To pay strict attention

An apparently major distinction comes with paronomasia. This involves two iterations, as in
antanaclasis, but, crucially, in paronomasia the words are not pure homophones: ‘out, sword,
and to a sore purpose!’
‘I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most capricious poet, honest
Ovid, was among the Goths’.

early modern pronunciation meant that ‘goats’ and ‘Goths’ would have been pure
homophones for some speakers: [go:ts].
 Asteismus involves a deliberate shifting of sense by a second speaker:

Not all examples rely on a shift between senses, and so would fall
outside our definition of puns
Обьяснение
There are certainly some instances of criticism of mis- or
overused figures of ambiguity in the Renaissance. Around the
end of the sixteenth century, John Hoskyns warned against over
extending paronomasia. It is significant that Hoskyns here criticizes puns which rely on
similarity in sound rather than similarity in sense.

Rhetoricians had previously warned against overuse of figures like

paronomasia and had suggested that it was not a very serious figure,
but they had very specifically not ruled it out altogether. With the
Enlightenment comes a new disgust at the way puns were held to
operate, and a resolution to purge them from the language.
 What is a word?

Perhaps the most serviceable answer relies on orthography

A word is a group of letters marked off by

white space (or ending with a typographic
symbol such as < . > or < ! >.

As the Renaissance knew well, writing is not

‘language’; it is a representation of language.
So, using non-linguistic, orthographical
conventions to arrive at a
definition of a linguistic feature (or what we
assume to be a linguistic feature) must be
unsatisfactory.
 What is a word?

If we move back one stage in the process of representation

from writing to speech, ‘words’ can be considered to be
groups of acoustic energy – vibrations produced by the
manipulation of breath and the vocal tract. But shifting to
the acoustic level does not really help us with a precise
definition of ‘word’: acoustic analysis of actual speech shows
that ‘words’ are not separated from each other by silences.
Speech tends to come in continuous bursts, with silences or
pauses at the end of groups of ‘words’. Many early
writing systems reflect this by not having white space bet
ween words: theyuseinsteadsomethingcalledscriptiocontinua
(ancient Greek, for example).

Orthographic, or acoustic, analysis, then, will not supply us

with a scientific definition of ‘word’.
 To cope with this degree of variation, linguists use the abstract notion of the phoneme: an
element which has no actual sound value, but which abstractly represents the site where
various realizations can be triggered. Phonemes are marked with angled lines: /w±rd/, while the
actual sounds which might realize a phoneme are represented in square brackets: [w´dt ]. This
concept of an abstract which has no actual existence, but may be instantiated by a range of
possible realizations, will prove very useful in trying to think about puns and words in
Shakespeare’s work. Addison’s model of ‘word’ presupposes the ideal of one sense
to one form.16 He clearly assumes that where there are two senses, but apparently one form,
then we must be dealing with a case of two identical, but different, forms.

This is a fundamental shift, both in the definition of ‘pun’

(from one word with two senses, to two words with two
senses), and in the definition of ‘word’.

For Addison and the later seventeenth century, ‘words’ are distinguished
primarily by having different senses (if you have a different sense, you have
a different word), and then (ideally) by formal differences – if not in
sound, then in spelling. So different ‘words’ which happen to ‘agree in
sound’ can be distinguished by spelling.
For the early modern language user, ‘words’ are abstracts with various possible
realizations, and understanding them depends wholly on context– users know
that multiple possible physical realizations exist for many groupings of semantic
content.

([coarse/course]=[rude]/[race track]; [dye/die]=[to colour]/[to expire]).

For Saussure, the linguistic sign consists of two parts: a signal (which can be the
acoustic sound or the written letters) and the mental concept this evokes (the
signified).

Because the connection between the things joined is ‘hidden’ and

‘irrelevant’, all the joy of puns, for Booth, lies with the pun
maker.
 Conclusion

Wordplay in the Renaissance does not begin with difference and seek resemblance:
it begins with identity and explores distinction. Thinking of puns
in this way challenges Booth’s witty, but intellectually bankrupt,
representation of them. In the Renaissance, at least, puns are not
trivial relations between essentially unrelated things paraded
triumphantly before a passive audience: they are active processes
of disambiguation in which the audience must engage.

The Renaissance audience of a pun is involved in actively

maintaining the double play of meaning: the present-day audience
is a passive observer.
THANK YOU